STARWEST 2018 - Project Manager
Customize your STARWEST 2018 experience with sessions covering project management.
Tuesday, October 2
Agile Testing: Team Tactics that Deliver the Goods
Preview Sold Out!Let’s face it—agile testing is different. Challenges exist in successfully integrating within the teams themselves. Scrummerfall continues to run rampant. The dichotomy of testing vs. quality—and balancing both the team’s and your focus—still exists. Delivering value is both an imperative and a challenge. In this dynamic workshop, join agile coaches Mary Thorn and Bob Galen to explore the tools, techniques, and mindset you must bring to the table to successfully test in agile contexts. Mary and Bob examine risk-based testing, iterative test planning, exploratory testing, agile...
Agile Test Team Leadership: From Concept to Product
Sold Out!Today, many agile organizations are making a terrible error. They are assuming there is no place for test management and leadership in agile, self-directed team contexts. Mary Thorn and Bob Galen beg to differ with this view and believe a strong need exists for testing leadership in agile organizations—just different from the way we’ve typically approached it. Join Mary and Bob as they explore what excellent test team leadership looks like in agile contexts. Explore the aspects of self-directed teams and the implications to your previous leadership styles. Look under the covers of Scrum...
Testing Leadership IQ
PreviewHave you ever needed a way to measure your testing leadership IQ? Or been in a performance review where the majority of time was spent discussing your need to improve as a leader? If you have ever wondered what your core leadership competencies are and how to build on and improve them, Jennifer Bonine shares a toolkit to help you do just that. This toolkit includes a personal assessment of your leadership competencies and the evolution of testing and testing leadership. Join Jennifer as she explores a set of eight dimensions of successful leaders, provides suggestions on how you...
Wednesday, October 3
Testing In The Dark
Isn’t it amazing? Stakeholders drop software on our desks and expect us to test it—without any requirements, design, or product knowledge whatsoever. About the only clear thing is the absurd and unrealistic deadline. We are expected to bend over backward, spread magic pixie dust, and heroically test quality into a product we have never heard of before. But testing in the dark is not impossible, and as Rob Sabourin shows, it can even be a very valuable and fun experience. Learn strategies to emerge from a murky fog into clear, meaningful quality insights and leverage unlikely sources about...
Improve Planning Estimates by Reducing Your Human Biases
PreviewAre you puzzled about why your estimate turned out wrong, or stressed from working to meet an impossible deadline? Some teams on inaccurately estimated projects suffer stress, burnout, and poor quality as pressure is applied to stick to an unrealistic schedule. Such project teams also descend into irrational decision-making—with potentially catastrophic consequences. Frustratingly, even when teams perform well, they are often judged by their failure to meet impossible deadlines. Andrew Brown will show how estimation errors are caused not just by new technology or intentionally...
Risk Based Testing: Communicating WHY You Can't Test Everything
The idea of testing everything is a popular one—in fact many stakeholders think that’s exactly what their quality teams do. It usually isn’t and can’t be; but how can teams communicate this? Join Jenny Bramble as she helps to pave the way using the language of risk-based testing. By defining risk in two simple parts, the team and project have a tangible and usable metric. She shares how to apply this metric and use it to determine where the team should focus testing, making it more effective and efficient whilst communicating that effort through the creation of a risk matrix. As a result,...
Thursday, October 4
Be the Lord of Your OWN Rings: How to Build Your OWN Insider Testing Program
Many testers just don't plain get listened to. Management doesn’t seem to listen despite you having a really good idea on how to reduce costs without reducing quality. How can a well-meaning tester act as an agent of change and change your corporate landscape? Dona is the Lord of the Rings at Microsoft where she co-creates the future of Windows with 10M + #WindowsInsiders all over the world. They are one of the biggest fan and influencer programs in the tech industry—one that helps shape the future of Microsoft technology every single day. She will guide you on how to create a fan and...
What Aircrews Can Teach Testing Teams
PreviewUnited Flight 232 should have crashed with all 296 lives lost. Asiana Flight 214 should not have crashed at all. But the reality is very different. Peter Varhol and Gerie Owen explain that the critical difference between the two flights was the interactions of their respective aircrews. United Flight 232 divided up responsibilities and worked as a team, using Aircrew Resource Management (ARM) to guide how the crew behaved during the flight, and especially in a crisis. Asiana Flight 214 deferred to the captain, neither communicating nor questioning his decisions in crisis. ARM helps...
Building a Skilled Testing Practice In an Innovative Digital Agency
PreviewEverybody wants to have their projects tested so that they can deliver top-notch products to their clients. But with multiple projects all running in parallel, all with tight deadlines and all needing testing, simply allocating a tester on a project for some time isn’t going to give you quality. This, in turn, can sometimes make our stakeholders question the value of testing. Join Nimesh Patel as he shares his experience in building a test practice and team from the ground up into valued, credible members of a project, in a digital agency where the focus is often on delivering...
Delivering the Goods: Harmonizing Regulated and Agile Practices
Agile testing is hard. Testers contend with terse requirements, minimal process, little documentation, continually evolving business, technical and organizational factors. Auditors demand proof of compliance. Some teams have trouble conforming to regulations while preserving agile practices. Griffin Jones, a tenured regulated software testing consultant, says “not only can agile practices blend with regulatory compliance - they can be harmonized with them leading to high quality and more agility.” Griffin feels that regulators are project stakeholders, who join the product owner in...
Testing Imprecise Requirements
Articles on abc.net and elsewhere reported that Volvo has recently discovered a non-traditional requirement: Any self-driving vehicle approved for use outside Australian cities must recognize kangaroos on or near the roadway and take proper actions. The kangaroo’s bounce confused the large animal detector! In this session, industry expert David Gelperin shares a new perspective on the value of imprecise requirements and explores the nature of testing them. Excess precision may hamper the development of optimal solutions by excluding effective designs. Imprecise statements reduce the risk...
Why "Why...?" Can Be the Most Important Question for QA to Ask
PreviewTo test a product, there are so many questions to ask, and so little time in which to ask them. More often than not, we get caught up in the who, what, when, and how, but Jane Jeffers from Riot Games explains that “why…?” questions can be the most important ones to ask when it comes to QA work. When missing the whys, we can wind up only focusing on specific details like who needs to do the work or when our deadlines are, and subsequently lose the bigger picture of why a project matters, and why we do what we do. Learn some of the key ways that you can ask why for product, for...
Risk Based Testing – Are You Talking the Talk, Or Walking the Walk?
PreviewRisk-based testing is essential to focus our testing, but it is not always easy to apply to our projects. Risk management tends to focus more on project and process risks (i.e., Will we make the deadline? Do we follow our processes?) and less on the product risks that can act as a foundation for a risk-based approach to test. Including this aspect of risk in your test coverage will give you a solid foundation for defining a test strategy that implements and executes the right tests with the right intensity to mitigate the most critical product risks. In this presentation, Gitte...
Reception and Summit Kickoff: As a Leader, What Is Keeping You Up at Night?
Kickoff the Testing & Quality Leadership Summit with a reception and some networking.